After much hardship I've figured out how to change the Project Settings for Premier Elements. Basically all the project settings are stored in the .prel file (the file you save your project to), so if you edit this file with wordpad it's possible to change the Project Settings after you've started your project. Below is a simple guide.

Editing prel files

1) Go to the folder with your .prel files in. The .prel files are the project files and are usually in the C:\Users\[username]\Documents\Adobe\Premiere Elements\[version of premiere] (obviously replace the [username] and [version of premiere] with your user name and the version of Premiere you have).

<FieldType> is the interlacing. 0 = progressive (no interlacing), 1 is lower, and 2 is upper. <FrameRate> is how many frames per second there are. 10594584000 is 23.97 fps, 10160640000 is 25fps, and 8475667200 is 29.9 fps.<PixelAspectRatio> is the aspect ratio. 1,1 is square pixels; 10,11 is NTSC; 40,33 is NTSC widescreen; 768,702 is PAL; 1024,702 is PAL widescreen.<FrameRect> is the size of the clips. 0,0,720,480 is 720 by 480; 0,0,1280,720 is 1280 by 720; and 0,0,640,480 is 640 by 480

Change these setting to whatever you want your project to be. Make sure you don't use incompatible values, such as square pixels with 720x480 clips, or Premiere won't display it correctly.

I'd also recommend going through the prel and updating all the other <FrameRate>, <PixelAspectRatio>, and <FrameRect> entries so that the project doesn't have one setting but all the tracks have another setting.

Editing SQPRESET files

If you don't want to keep editing prel files you can make your own preset.

1) Go to the C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\[your version of Adobe Premiere Elements]\Settings\SequencePresets. Obviously replace [your version of Adobe Premiere Elements] with your version of Adobe Premiere Elements, such as Adobe Premiere Elements 11.

2) Find a preset you want to edit and open it with wordpad. I choose the Standard 48kHz in the NTSC\DV folder.

<VideoFieldType> is the interlacing. 0 = progressive (no interlacing), 1 is lower, and 2 is upper. <VideoFrameRate>is how many frames per second there are. 10594584000 is 23.97 fps, 10160640000 is 25fps, and 8475667200 is 29.9 fps.<VideoFrameSize> is the size of the clips. 0,0,720,480 is 720 by 480; 0,0,1280,720 is 1280 by 720; and 0,0,640,480 is 640 by 480

Change these setting to whatever you want your project to be. Make sure you don't use incompatible values, such as square pixels with 720x480 clips or Premiere won't display it correctly.

Elements is pretty much locked by default, yes. Though I wasn't aware that it would actually work if you edited it like that.

By the way, as far as framerate goes, elements works like premiere pro, as in the framerate is obtained by dividing 254016000000 by the number saved in the project. This is so that the framerate is actually precise and not an approximation, I believe. The number is used in internal calculations, most likely, for things like framerate resampling and so on.For those that wonder, 254016000000 is the lcm of the framerates that premiere has (well, maybe not the actual lcm, not sure, but certainly a good number for the purpose). Examples:25fps is precise, thus 25000/1000 => 254016000000*1000/25000 = 10160640000 => 254016000000/10160640000 = 2523.976 is an approximation of 24000/1001 => 254016000000*1001/24000 = 10594584000 => 254016000000/10594584000 = 23,976023...29.97 is an approximation of 30000/1001 => 254016000000*1001/30000 = 8475667200 => 254016000000/8475667200 = 29,970029...Following this reasoning it should be possible to specify custom framerates for premiere to use, maybe.

Premiere Elements was too good, so they started to remove features. Not only important features to a video editing program in particular, but user experience stuff and settings. From having to deal with helping people out who use it i've found they actually went so far as to keep settings exactly as they are in Premiere Pro, but changed the default value for the setting. It's like the team in charge got the premiere pro code base and was tasked with eleminating or changing X things so they could sell a gimped discount version and ran out of major things to change half-way through.